The armoured soldiers advancing… The beams and shot-rounds threading the gloom… The blur of Aksinya as she tried to rise and face the figures coming through the other hatch…

And then she saw the shadow. It was standing in the open blast doors that the second squad of troopers had just poured through. It was still. Upright. A freeze-frame on a pict-stream.

The ringing in her head was building, and all she could think of was the message she carried in her memory, and the smell of wet fur and blood and frost.

The troopers were still advancing, their fingers squeezing back on triggers as the passing instants blinked in time with the alert lights.

Red, black…

Red, black…

Red, black…

Red.

The shadow was behind them.

Black.

And now the shadow was next to them, and Mersadie could hear the siren-scream in her head beating with the blink of seconds.

Red.

Blood sprayed out. The troopers were turning, and the shadow was amongst them, moving in jerks like a broken pict-feed.

Black.

Aksinya was still on the floor by the hatch, her pistol frozen in her hand. There was red frost climbing the walls. Bodies flying back, broken, pulped.

Red.

The shadow was standing still now, washed in gore, its head turning to Mersadie, and she could see the face within shadow, eyes stained red in the black-veined skull of Sub-mistress Koln.

‘We are here for you,’ said the thing and it reached out fingers that stretched into shadows through the air, and all Mersadie could think of was running in dreams through dark woods and the howls rising behind her. ‘We are the–’

The las-blast ripped the side of Koln’s skull off. The shadow-wrapped body jerked back. Mersadie fired again, and again, stepping forwards as the thing staggered and the blasts ripped through it. It juddered, flesh and blood shuddering as it fell.

She stood over it, still, panting, the charge pack depletion light blinking red on the pistol in her hand. The only sound was the patter of blood falling to the deck from the ceiling above.

The Warp

∞

Snow boils from the black sky as the old man begins to climb the mountain. Ice-caked fur and black rags wrap his body. The wind strikes him, and he staggers, half falling. His hands plunge into the snow.

Cold.

Burning cold.

Beyond fire, beyond water.

He gasps, and for a moment the snow is not snow, but every moment of pain ever suffered: the wail of a mother beside a small bundle, the last thought of a man dying before his time, the touch of a knife. Cold, sharp, burning…

He pushes himself up.